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At Freelancer.com, you can hire someone on the other side of the world to design a website for you, which means you’ll probably pay far less than you would for a local designer. Users post their projects, wait for bids to come in, and then accept one. The most popular jobs include design work, online marketing, search engine optimization, and copywriting—work that can be done from anywhere and then delivered online.

The website—and others like it, including Elance.com and 99designs.com—are powerful tools in the new freelance economy, in which workers are looking to take more control of their income by earning money through various side gigs and businesses are looking to cut costs by outsourcing more tasks. But there is a dark side to the phenomenon, too.

Graphic designers have been particularly vocal, arguing that sites that allow buyers to bid on projects drive down prices and make it more difficult for them to earn a fair wage. They are, after all, competing with designers from all over the world, many of whom are willing to work for far less than they are. As the Canadian design company Headspace explained on its blog, “99designs is bad for the design industry as a whole because it cheapens the profession, literally and figuratively. It perpetrates the notion that graphic design is easy, and all you need is the right software and a ‘good eye’ to be able to do it effectively.”

Headspace also pointed out that asking freelancers to bid on work by submitting their designs, as 99designs does, means requiring designers to spend time and effort to create work without any guarantee of payment. Headspace founder Kyle Racki writes, “To ask a designer, who would normally charge money by the hour or by the project, to give away free design work ‘competing’ to win a project is like asking a carpenter to build you a chair with the hopes of getting paid if you like it.”

On Freelancer.com, which has close to three million global users, jobs tend to flow from wealthier nations, where companies, start-ups, and entrepreneurs are looking to outsource their work to countries where the cost of living is lower and workers are hungry for those projects. Together, the United States and Great Britain make up 50 percent of outsourcing offers, while one-third of the freelancers using the site come from India. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines make up an additional 20 percent of freelancers. (Some 11 percent are in the United States.)

Unlike 99designs.com, freelancers at Freelancer.com don’t complete the work before they are selected, they simply submit their bid. Still, freelancers in wealthier countries who charge more for their services face a distinct disadvantage, since they are competing with workers around the world.